The_Schoonermaster's

I will tell you the story of a woman who was brave and high-spirited and oddly detached from the social and personal ties that occupy the lives of most working and family folk. She was my friend, Sarah Tilber, and only now, with her life complete, am I aware of how acutely I miss her vivid presence and the lively illumination of far-off places that her letters used to bring me.

Sarah’s story will concern one of her forebears, but I shall begin with a recollection that involves Sarah and my own grandmother. This was when we were both about seven years old, a wet Saturday when my father drove us to Lowestoft to visit this old lady.

‘She is blind, Sal,’ I informed her solemnly as the rain flecked the windows of the car. ‘Her eyes have been …’ I paused before supplying the word I had been taught on previous visits to the harbour town, ‘… enucleated.’

‘Which can make Jennifer’s grandma seem rather formidable,’ my father quickly added from the front seat.

‘What’s enucleated?’ asked Sarah.

‘When they take the eyeballs out,’ explained my father more fearsomely than was his usual manner with children.

I remember Sarah contemplated this information for some moments as the frowning, redbrick villas beside the road flashed past us. Whenever she was in the company of grownups, she had a certain ‘mature’ tone that she adopted. ‘How impossible not to be able to see,’ she stated, and in the rear-vision mirror I saw both my parents smile at this.

In due course we arrived before my gran’s grey house and went through the hall to where she sat in what was still (in 1954) called the parlour. This was a dark, high room, dusty, cobwebby, with thick, floor-length curtains that were, despite the daytime, pulled shut. A standard lamp with a tasselled shade highlighted different brass and porcelain objects on the mantelpiece which were arranged around a clock in a marble cabinet decorated by carved figures playing pipes or carrying pitchers. Gran sat, huge, slab-faced and unseeing, in her high-backed chair. She wore a black dress with beige lace around the neck which resembled the froth on a glass of stout. Her stockings were thick and the colour of milk tea, and her feet bulged from her round black shoes like two buns from their baking trays. Never could I quite bring myself to look at the place where her eyes were.

‘Gran, this is Sarah.’

The great head tilted towards where Sarah and I stood before her and nodded once or twice. ‘Then Sarah must come and stoop just here,’ Gran instructed. My friend did so, and held herself rigidly as the massive old lady felt all over the tensely serious face and around the contours of Sarah’s shoulders and arms. ‘I have to establish your presence, young lady,’ said my grandmother in the odd strained voice which Sarah was later to say ‘did not belong to our century’. My parents and I watched the progress of Gran’s hands as they gathered information, methodical, careful, like those of a vet handling an animal.

‘It’s all right, Sal,’ I remember assuring her.

‘I know that!’ She smiled quickly to disguise her impatience.

We were given tea and required to render a clear account of ourselves to the old lady, schoolwork, hobbies, holidays. Later, while the grown-ups talked and the teacups clinked, the two of us went into Gran’s bedroom and devised a game of clambering around the room from dresser to chair, from wardrobe to the bed with its high mattresses and eiderdown. Under our rules, touching the floor was prohibited. We shut the door on ourselves so that the room was in darkness, and, in our absorption, lost track of time. All at once the door opened and Gran stood there, silhouetted with her stick in one hand and the other on the lintel.

‘You girls! You girls! I can’t see you.’ Her voice was querulous. For perhaps a minute Sarah and I remained silent, balanced on the furniture in our respective corners. Then Gran shuffled into the room and stood near the bed. ‘I say that I can’t see you,’ she scolded.

‘Yes you can,’ replied Sarah’s voice from the darkness above the tallboy, ‘because you established me.’

There was a further interval of silence before Gran informed Sarah that she was a forward young lady. The admonition was enough to distract her from the chastisement she had intended for what she must have guessed was our disarrangement of her bedroom. We each descended from our perches and slunk past her and out of the room.

The rain eased, we were encouraged outside, and walked together along the seawall with our hoods up. Sarah was subdued. ‘I don’t like being touched all over,’ she decided at last. After an interval she said, ‘I looked at them, Jenn.’

‘Her eyes?’

‘Yes. It was awful. Like when you open up a prune with your spoon. Like … like her centre had been scooped out. But I looked at them.’

We watched the brown water slap at the sides of the fishing boats until it was time to go home. And she did not accompany me on our visits to Lowestoft again.

You have established me.

Thirty-five years later, in the last phase of her life, Sarah embarked upon a personal quest that involved her attempt to establish the presence of a vanished forebear, the seafaring great-uncle, Charles Tilber, whose elusive presence we will follow on these pages. Her quest gained in momentum and intensity as the months unfolded. Nonetheless she left it unfinished—undetermined might be the more exact word—at the time of her disappearance in July 1990, near the border of Peru with Chile.

During this final period of her life I was, I believe, her only confidante. It had been Sarah’s custom to write to me two or three times a year, but during 1989–90 her correspondence—chatty, bulky missives, postcards crammed with black handwriting, her final, haunting audio cassette from Valparaíso—used to arrive at my kitchen table at the rate of one or more items per week.

Sarah’s quest, you must understand, was founded upon an intellectual passion to do with the past. I have one handwritten letter, posted from Australia in October 1989 when she was some four months into what she was then calling her ‘Retrieval Project’. In this she tried to describe for me the complex nature of her preoccupation.

Semaphore, October 4th 1989

Dearest Jenn,

No! I think in your last to me you are missing my point. It is this.

If, without loss to the vividness of my present life, I can take my shrewdest sympathies back into oblivion (as we must suppose Orpheus did) and restore Charlie Tilber’s quickened presence from my family’s past, together with the people of his life—Milliken, the Kilbride’s Captain Yuell and his family—what an adventure of the mind! I would be rescuing for the light of day all that may be rescued of that lovable old seafarer’s actuality, and that would bring me, surely, the potency for all former, inconspicuous lives to be recovered for the human mind, each in its delicate individuality.

It is for this reason I will then be able to say: The past completes me. How shall I bring home for you the emotion this possession of the past arouses? Be patient.

I start with this present moment. I am on Semaphore Beach again. It is untidier than the last time I wrote. Strewn in the tiderows of sea-grass are broken thongs, glittery rags of cellophane, waxy sweetpapers, crushed drink cans. Not far away I can see a half-eaten hotdog which seagulls, in a blizzard of wings, are fighting over (as no doubt seagulls did a century ago when the people in frock coats and muslins dropped the sandwich crusts of their picnics, the butts of cheroots, scraps of lint, broken shoelaces).

Beyond this the sea has an austere beauty this afternoon. There is some sheet lightning on the horizon in the direction of Yorke Peninsula. The ocean is flat in the pre-storm, with lovely, pewtery patches intermingling with dark velvety striations, while the sky has a dramatic, furled, charcoal front coming my way with a great milky curtain of rain behind it. I can see the dipping triangle of a lone boardrider’s sail, striped fluorescent red and green. And just now a man in shorts, singlet and the kind of straw trilby you can buy at chemist shops here, came past and advised, ‘You’ll get a wetting any moment, I’d say, lady,’ in exactly that tone which Australians of this era like to try on authority while pretending to be one’s equal. ‘Yes. Thank you very much,’ I told him, and he shrugged, and called his dog, and squeaked away across the white sand towards the car parks and the Norfolk Island pine trees. (You see! Despite your worries, my welfare seems to get well looked after.) Apart from me, and Mr Trilby, the beach is empty of people north and south, and the wind is not yet high.

There! Presto! You are here. I can establish this for you. I can hold the present in my hands like a quantity. Yet this is not sufficient, not for me, not for anyone, because I am unwilling to overlook that what is present glitters with what has been present.

So I go back to my Charlie Tilber. Can I confine my purpose with Great-Uncle T to a biography at all? Yes, I say, if it begins and ends with simply wanting to capture a person’s life story. But my impulse towards bygone matters is altogether more peculiar when I examine it closely. I think it is to do with wanting to inhabit more of time than has been given me, to inhabit Charlie T’s time as intimately as the moments of my own I have just described. Perhaps everyone hankers after this identification with what has gone before.

You see, it is this reflex to put me, Sarah Tilber, in the picture that makes me want to attempt more than an objective life story. I want to be on the inside of what he would have called his own time. Can I thus transfer my sympathetic self? I think so.

Better than anyone, you know how I love the atmosphere of those old ships and docklands because you used to share the feeling. Yesterday I was looking at a collection of historical maritime photos, and came upon a double-page photograph taken in 1881 of shipping in London’s South-West India Dock. It is before my mind’s eye as I sit here writing to you. It shows such a bristling, chaotic palisade of masts and yards. There are barges and lighters jumbled together beneath the great steel hulls of the merchantmen, whose lower yards are ‘cockbilled’ as they sway their cargoes out of the holds and into the hands of the waiting Londoners. There are bales and tarpaulins, and gantries disappearing into the London fog. I find it so moving, Jenn, to contemplate the scale of what is so precariously present in the old photo, and how all the far-flung places of earth are incipient in the cavernous holds of those ships. Timber or tins of salmon from Puget Sound are being discharged here, jaggery from Madras, jute from Calcutta or Manila, wool from Geelong or Lyttelton, guano or nitrate from Iquique or Antofagasta. I see this. My beach and my photo, 1881 and 1989, the one combines with the other as naturally as atoms in a molecule or light and shade on the surface of the sea.

So, how automatic it is for me to sit here on this beach, yet imagine myself present, viewing this spectacle of 1880s’ shipping in the photo, coal smoke brought to my nostrils on the damp river breeze, Great-Uncle’s short figure beside me in a shore-going bowler hat, and a watch chain looped from buttonhole to waistcoat pocket. He has family traits I would recognise: habits of mind, a genetic make-up identifiable with my own in the colour of his eyes, perhaps, or the texture of his hair. I am enmeshed in the same genetic and cultural pattern he was! Not that he will talk to me or do his thinking in my head. Hah! Not yet, at least.

You see, what I want to find out is how one might manage such an identification across the borders of a lifetime; how, with lots of tact, knowledge of detail, and as much shrewdness as I can muster, I might tune my imagination to conducting it. Is this vicarious? Is this just play-acting? Do write and tell me.

The first rain is coming down in big splotches. I must run, or these biro’d pages will be ruined. Love, S.

Passion-of-the-intellect. Despite what might appear in this story, Sarah was averse to the mystical. Once, at a college party in our late teens, we both sat in a circle on a wooden floor in a big, empty house and smoked opiated hashish from a gurgly brass pipe.

‘How did you find it?’ she asked me next morning, leaning her back on the tree that supported the hammock where I reclined.

I was quite definite that I had found the experience nauseous and vile. ‘No-one seemed to be able to do anything but grin. And at one point I was aware of some creature snuffling at me. He had some impediment in his nostrils and was like a big, long-nosed dog. I hated the grinners, and hated myself for hating them. How about you?’

‘Swimmy,’ she pronounced, ‘and a most extraordinary derangement of my time sense.’

‘Like how?’ She was rocking the hammock for me, gently.

‘As I walked home by myself along Wherstead Road I lived, no, was being lived, through aeons. I couldn’t say if it was late, or nearly dawn, or a Saturday in summer, because such considerations would have been so trivial. I seemed to be trailing immense centuries, flaking them off me. Like a comet.’

‘You sound very spiritual about it.’

Absently she pushed the hammock and said, ‘I could start a religion based on the distances I seemed to see last night. But Jenn! It was hateful. I want to choose where I am. I insist on it.’ We became careful about the parties we went to.

Sarah’s insistence that she should choose where she was informs her part in this story. But I sense there to be more to the story itself. When I came to re-read the letters in the light of her disappearance, I was perplexed. This was because the nature of Sarah’s quest, begun in a spirit of such buoyant curiosity, appeared to me to have gradually enclosed her in an atmosphere of fatality and to have foreshadowed the end that overtook her. In a way that I find unwelcome, it made that fate, if no less atrocious, somehow determined and acceptable.

Sarah and I grew up as neighbours near Ipswich in East Anglia and it is my impression that our friendship dates from at least the time we were toddlers, able to babble our first articulate thoughts to each other. We attended the same schools, the same university, sharing in some cases identical courses and tutorials. Sometimes, on the macadam surface of the playground, the girls would dance to a particular jingle, and they would do this more pointedly whenever they saw Sarah and I nearby.

My mother said I never should

Play with the gypsies in the wood.

If I did she would say

‘Naughty girl to disobey,

Disobey, disobey,

Naughty girl to disobey.’

The woods are dark, the grass is green,

Here comes Sally with a tambourine …

‘The Twins’, ‘The Conchies’, ‘The Left and Right Pocket’ were various epithets used to describe or deride our inseparableness. Other companions came and went from our circle; the casual spite from peers could not assail the simple liking we had, one for the other, and our friendship endured, with its sustaining in-jokes and shared phantasmagoria and, in truth, a certain defensive spite we ourselves showed towards those outside our confidence.

We lived not far from the navigable Orwell. Towards this river we used to wander, abandoning our bicycles to descend, wading through two cornfields and a wood tangled with blackberry, to the bank with its low gnarled hawthorns and dilapidated fences. There, at low tide, we might heave one gumboot after another from the suction of the blue-grey foreshore mud, on the lookout for interesting flotsam, or, with squeals of glee, fish out on the end of a stick the ghostly white condoms that floated down from Ipswich docks.

‘Sal! It’s a whopper!’

‘It’s a sock, surely! Or a rubber nightcap!’

‘It’s from a person who must need special trousers!’

In holiday time, with our legs dangling over the wooden Cathouse Road Hard, we chewed a stick of liquorice or, later in our teens, experimented with cigarettes. There was, I remember, a slender fellow with blue overalls and a shock of white-blond hair who, invariably, could be seen at work in the well of the clinker-built cutters, pinnaces and launches that were tethered to the jetty. We had nicknamed him Floss, and used to enjoy sitting above him, offering bits of impudent advice, watching with delight his neck grow redder as he wrapped his leather strop around a propeller shaft and then pulled manfully in his efforts to make a diesel engine work.

‘Hey bo-uy!’ we called, imitating his broad accent. ‘We’z embarrazzin’ ye-ou?’

‘Not that ev remarked on et,’ he would reply stolidly, not unbending from his task.

Out on the river’s broad reaches were the bobbing dinghies with red or sky-blue sails which belonged to the nearby boarding school. These would scatter before the great cream and black steamers that loomed upstream, spiky with masts, derricks and ventilators, their slab-sided hugeness somehow out of scale with the riverbank trees and the black and white cows on the far bank. I recall how the glimpse of a peaked hat high on the superstructure of these thrumming monsters, or the different national flags fluttering at their stern rails, used to prompt in the two of us an odd, charged emotion, in part yearning, in part an exhilaration that such clues of an exotic, further world could pass back and forth before our eyes, betokened by no more than an arrangement of colourful stripes, crescents or stars on a rectangle of flapping cotton, or a remote foreigner in a blue uniform with a splodge of white on his head.

On calm Saturday mornings we used to watch as one of two London barges, moored downriver in Pin Mill Bay, hoisted its quadrangular cinnamon-coloured sails beneath the varnished sprits, forever preparing to depart without ever seeming to do so. We used to amble home from the Pin Mill sweet shop beside the small cabin boats moored to the bank by their long painters which were hung with beards of luminous green seaweed. If it rained, we sheltered under the chocked-up hulls of yachts, kicking wood shavings, smelling the new marine paint, idly trying out various dreamy futures.

‘We’ll buy a boat and sail to the Andaman Islands.’

‘Won’t we need someone who knows about boats?’

‘We’ll bribe Floss to come.’

‘What with?’

‘Cigarettes. Sherbet lemons.’

‘He’s a man. He’ll want more than that.’

‘I don’t see why.’

‘Sal!’

‘Then we will make sure he behaves.’

‘He’ll be useless for conversation.’

‘He can be trained.’ And then Sarah would call out to Floss, who might be painting red lead on a nearby hull, ‘We’z for takin’ ye-ou to the Andaman Islands, Flozi! Goo’n awee’n pack.’

‘No thang-hyou,’ he would reply.

For always, of course, we were at this banter, provoking, conjecturing, daydreaming aloud. In all our acquaintance I cannot remember having had a serious quarrel with Sarah and, as I say, we remained in correspondence after she moved to Australia in 1978.

This was our 1950s’ and ’60s’ pastoral. I depict it in some detail because the milieu of a working river was so much a background to our childhood and teenage years, and it qualified Sarah well for the story which, two decades or so later, and on the other side of the world, she decided she wanted to tell. Like many children who grow up in a vivid environment, for all that we suffered our odd bouts of despondency, we were never seriously unhappy. And we took for granted the river commerce until we both, in turn, moved away from it and, as a result, found in our vacant moments that we longed for its proximity and colour.

Teacher and schools librarian that she became, I want to say that in the force of her being, Sarah was ever the historian.

‘… Because I can remember things finely and am shocked when I hear other people recall them coarsely,’ she once explained.

Fiercely, of course, she insisted she was an amateur in historical matters, but I could observe how spontaneous was her curiosity about bygone things, how sure was her instinct for the atmosphere of a given epoch. ‘There is properly no history, Jenn, only biography.’ She used to come from lectures quoting this Emerson to me.

‘You’re holding forth again, Sal,’ she liked to be reminded on such occasions.

‘Surely not!’

And if there was one aspect of the past which most fascinated her it was that period just slipping from view, the era not quite our own, rich in archival photographs and documents, ‘still warm from use’, as she used to say, yet from which the minutiae of mind, of gesture, and expression, had already been all but effaced.

Let me illustrate for you this cast of her mind. During her last visit to me from Australia in 1989 we had gone walking one misty November morning along the Suffolk lanes near my husband’s school. The trees were all but bare and the brown leaves were gathered in sodden, oily-coloured drifts in the ditches beside the roads. For some time we spoke little, taking a rest from conversation after having talked late the previous night. Passing over a stile into a field, Sarah paused on the wooden step and, taking up the topic of our late-night discussion, she looked down at me and observed, ‘For instance, Jenn, you might ask what has happened to the word “wallah”?’

She dismounted from the stile and we continued down a muddy track. ‘I might ask that question,’ I remarked. ‘But you do so to clinch some point you were making last night.’

She laughed, and then proceeded in her characteristic headlong way. ‘As in “punkah-wallah”, “box-wallah” or “desk-wallah”,’ she said, ‘or as in the jolly, spectacled fellow on that Christian camp we attended near Cromer. We used to call him “Ping-pong Paterson, The Games Wallah”. Do you remember him?’

‘Of course.’

‘You can probably think of other words like that.’

‘“Scullery”,’ I tried on her, ‘where people used to black their boots and put the wash through the mangle. Or “skiffle”,’ I thought of another, ‘as in the rattly music which those fellows with slicked hair used to play on a washboard.’ The essence of our friendship, I was all too well aware, lay in the enjoyment I took in amplifying or, more rarely, gently puncturing a train of thought Sarah had initiated.

‘Exactly!’ she rejoined. ‘Do you see the fleeting thing I am trying to catch?’ and glanced at me searchingly.

‘We-ell.’

‘Almost all words illuminate authority. Think how the history of our time must be a complete blank for anyone ignorant of the term “wallah”,’ she declared.

‘Not a complete blank, Sal, surely.’

‘Complete!’ she insisted.

‘Complete, then.’ I smiled.

‘And that is not to mention the slippery difference in tone with which “wallah” might have been used by Major Bloggs in Delhi in 1943 and by his daughter, Dorothy Bloggs, at a Norfolk camp in 1963.’ We walked for several yards before she repeated emphatically, ‘A complete blank’. The lifted eyebrow and a hint of humour at the corners of her mouth allowed me to know Sarah was enjoying the effect her vehemence had on me.

‘I won’t argue.’

But she would be serious again in a moment, and her countenance could become energised, uplifted almost, like that of a person in the presence of their beloved.

‘The real point is, not only have the expressions slipped away from us, but look how a whole configuration of attitudes and authority has gone with them. Especially authority. It’s so negligent, the way the past sheds all its fine detail, all its … its pointillism. Don’t you agree?’

‘How can I not!’

She paused in her train of thought for a moment. ‘Jenny Happle, you can be mostly but not entirely in accord with me!’ This was said good-naturedly.

‘I reserve the right to listen with my own smile, Sal,’ I replied carefully.

She watched me for a moment or two before continuing. ‘Of course you do. Anyway, it’s this moment-by-moment that I’m resolved to recover around the life of Great-Uncle. If I can discover what he thought, I might be able to discern dimly the things it never occurred to him, as a person locked into his time, to think. For you see …’ Companionably she tucked her arm under mine and I was pleased by this because such casual physical gestures were rare in the headlong verbal style of her friendship. We had entered a small wood. The mist had created a film of droplets on our collars and woollen hats, but it was thinning, and there was a lovely, delicate bronziness perceptible now in the bare trees as the sun tried to shine through. ‘… That configuration is so almost reclaimable.’ We slushed among the wet leaves for several moments before she spoke again. ‘It is like … like looking at an expanse of water and trying to remember exactly how it appeared a moment ago. Sad, and thrilling too, don’t you think?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, for in the end I did not need my own lightly subversive smile. Sarah’s conviction, the entire force of her being, was too moving for me to wish to impede her enthusiasm. ‘Though people ridicule words like “wallah” now,’ I thought to add.

‘They’re history too!’ was her cheerful reply.

A time still warm from use. Sarah pored over old photographs, and I knew her to buy up tatty family collections when they were offered in junk shops or at jumble sales. This was one of her enthusiasms in the period before she emigrated to Australia as a not-so-young wife. It little mattered who was being depicted in such carefully posed sepia pictures: Sarah could construct that part of things herself, for this, after all, was the very point of purchasing them. What was attractive to her was the material evidence of bygone clothing, the characteristic postures of once-living people that gave clues to the temperament of an era, the differing traits of physique, hairstyle, complexion, that had now become submerged by a generation or two of small genetic modifications and several layers of fashion.

‘How can I tell what this child’s life was like until I see the kind of shoes she wore,’ was a remark Sarah once made to me during university, as we peered at a late-Victorian girl’s picture in one such album.

For this reason, then, I will now describe a particular photograph I once took of Sarah herself. I possess several pictures of my friend, both as a child and as a woman, but as I contemplated the task of turning her various papers into this memoir, the photo which I chose to set before me on my desk as a reminder of her presence was by no means the best I had. It shows Sarah at the age of seventeen. Her hair is longer and bushier than the bobbed style she adopted later. Her figure is a little plumper, her cheek more youthfully rounded than that of the more angular woman she became, and she has on some cheap, oddly fetching spectacles which she used whenever she was out walking. It is a black and white snapshot, taken in our last year at school, and the sun shines fully upon her pleasant face, causing her to frown in the same moment as she is smiling for the camera.

This ‘crossover’ in her expression has always disconcerted me slightly. Once, in a newspaper article about a young Australian journalist killed during the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, in the caption under his photo I learned a term the Vietnamese people use when they deem there is tragedy foreshadowed in the set of a particular face. They described the young Australian’s aspect as being ‘Sô’, and I know of no equivalent expression in other languages. Sô. Do I see just such a vulnerability when I look at my snapshot of Sarah? I prefer not to think it.

Yet it is an impact made more poignant because Sarah has moved at the shutter instant so that her features have blurred just slightly. The result is indeed to make her presence look somehow unstable, like those laboratory photographs depicting the transience of an electron. Furthermore, on the day when, during the school lunch hour, we broke bounds to collect the prints of this film from the chemist, I recall Sarah looked over my shoulder as I went through them, and coming to this representation of herself, with a laugh she exclaimed, ‘No, don’t keep that one, Jenn. I couldn’t bear anyone to think I am a blurred sort of a person!’

Nor, in the force of her personality, was she, even though I disobeyed her in this and the rather inferior snapshot passed into my album.

As I am able to reconstruct the Retrieval Project in Sarah’s mind, it seems to have formed unobtrusively during her years of marriage, and to have become more compelling at the time of her first flight from her husband, Kieran Fawne.

I want to be on the inside of what he would have called his own time. This, in practical terms, meant she wanted to write about her seafaring great-uncle. Her research commenced in Adelaide, took her in her hard-used Datsun around the harbour townships of the South Australian gulfs—Ardrossan, Edithburgh, Port Victoria—and I was sent snapshots, taken with her own camera by some willing local, of herself standing perhaps on a dilapidated pier, or beside the rusted skeleton of an old ketch. In the fierce Australian sunlight Sarah looks back at me from under her fringe of hair, hatless, self-conscious and, to my mind now, vulnerable.

These field trips were directed towards uncovering the last twenty years of her great-uncle’s seafaring life. To trace Charles Tilber’s years in deepwater sail between 1875 and 1900, Sarah returned to this country in 1989 on the visit I mention above. She wanted to see documents.

‘… Or rather, smell them, Jenn, let the edge of my hand feel the texture of the pages that the writer’s own hand moved across with the pen.’

‘So you won’t actually read their contents?’

‘Secondary,’ she laughed. For was she not, on this occasion, fresh from the archives of the Greenwich Maritime Museum, and the Kew Public Records Office. And how could I doubt her absorption in her task. I had known, from childhood onwards, how Sarah could focus her willpower with such intensity. ‘I looked at them, Jenn.’ ‘Her eyes?’ ‘Yes. It was awful. Like when you open up a prune with your spoon. Like … like her centre had been scooped out. But I looked at them.’ And thirty-five years later …

‘What an intent time of it I’ve had, Jenn.’

We drove away from the railway station in my car. ‘Kew was all shipping registers, official logs, certificates of discharge and other maritime whatnot. I spent my time making guesses about character on the basis of whether a signature was flourished or plain, scribbled or painstaking.’ Thus she chatted.

‘And Greenwich?’ I asked.

Ah, Greenwich! Here she had come upon Captain Yuell’s own logbooks from several of his voyages, page after page of wind directions, distance covered, noon positions, the taking in of this sail, the clapping on of that. ‘Ordinary vanished routines. Marvellous stuff! Why, just from the captain’s deliberate handwriting the whole Victorian ethic of self-improvement revealed itself to me. Marvellous.’

I commented that it was also marvellous the way she could turn a museum detail into an x-ray of an entire era.

But the animation of her spirits caused by Kew and Greenwich could not be checked. ‘In the same box I found …’ She allowed a moment of dramatic pause, and I glanced at her from my driving.

‘What?’

‘A letter by Mrs Yuell to her sister, together with a long postscript from Little Miss. Actually written from Valparaíso Bay and dated May 31st 1900.’

That was luck.’

‘Think! That killer storm was probably already building strength as they wrote! Unposted, of course, and eventually returned to the company by the British Legation. I spent the afternoon copying that poor woman’s handwriting, word for word, into my notebook, and I swear I never felt more committed … no, I have to say transposed! Just hours before she drowns, she is chatting to her sister in the perfect confidence that her future is a long, placid certainty. She mentions the ship’s first mate, Fordyce, her dearest, overstrained John, various crew members, though not much of Great-Uncle …’

‘And Little Miss?’

‘Little Miss, I discover, collects vocabulary in the same way she might gather seashells. For her aunt in this letter, she offers “boisterous”, “akimbo” and “tumult”. I surmise these words were used by Mama to describe what was then becoming visible outside the porthole of their cabin. You see how one can take these historical snapshots?’

‘Yes.’

‘The vital thing, though, is that I have discovered their actual voices, don’t you see? They’re …’ Sarah broke off. ‘Oh, I can practically feel my people stepping out before me. I mean it!’

‘I believe you,’ I assured her. Somehow her enthusiasm gave a sense that my car was full of people.

‘Not their entire lives, of course, but moments of them, and with all the delicacy of their last-century attitudes intact.’ I glanced at her quickly. For a moment her face was pensive in the dashboard lights. ‘It is so moving, you know, seeing their underpinning, their necessity.’

Thus she had exulted as the headlights swung this way and that along the lanes to the school. Later, we sat at my kitchen table with a glass of wine and she grew more self-conscious about her enthusiasm. ‘I should not flaunt these discoveries, should I, Jenn? For am I not preying on their misfortune?’

‘It was long, long ago, Sal.’ My assurance was ineffectual.

‘It was yesterday,’ she replied, ‘or as good as.’

But her moment’s self-doubt was, I thought, being unfair to her own talents and integrity. I used to wonder how her talents, her force of character, had eluded the workforce after she left Canberra, and in one of the letters I wrote to her in 1989 I asked, ‘Why, now that you are free, do you not pursue a career as a producer of TV documentaries, or become a high-profile academic historian with a round of conferences to attend?’

She replied in a prompt postcard. ‘And be surrounded by people who can violate how I wish to construe things? No fear.’

As she herself foresaw, Sarah’s project eventually refused to become a satisfactory retrieval. There were not enough recorded facts. Her solution to these cul de sacs was typically Sarah, as one late postcard I received from Valparaíso reveals.

‘Jenn,’ it reads, ‘with the archive on the Yuells now exhausted, I know all I will ever know about them. Time now to find that trance where I can invent reliably. Love, S.’

And invent she did, with a historical imagination of great resource and tact. Sarah believed her imaginings. That is to say, she took it for granted that whatever entered her imagination was possible. If that imagining embodied all the available evidence, then it was probable. Simple.

This has meant that I inherited a story that had not quite resolved itself between what did happen and what might well have happened.

I couldn’t bear anyone to think I am a blurred sort of a person, she had said in that moment of self-regard. But the circumstances of her disappearance are blurred and will probably remain so.

In the company of a chance-met old acquaintance, she was making her way to Lake Titicaca in the Andes. In one of her last letters she had posted me snapshots of the terrain in northern Chile. ‘Hills and ravines, Jenn, the colour of blotchy human skin. They fold into each other, and not a sprig of vegetation. Meagre concrete houses by the roadside, bunkers more than homes, all defaced by apparently meaningless graffiti. This, under a flawless blue sky, does nothing to lighten my gloomy mood …’

Written on the minibus that took her to Arica, this is the last glimpse Sarah provides me of herself.

It is known that the two of them hired bicycles from a shop in Arica, then vanished somewhere in the mountains between there and Pizacoma in August 1990. Despite investigation by the Peruvian authorities and the Australian and British embassies in Chile, no trace of either person has been found and the inquiry has concluded they met their deaths by misadventure. It is hard for me not to imagine some sordid atrocity was committed against her. Sarah was forty-three.

So I return to the snapshot on the desk before me. And I should say this. Through conviction, I live and teach with my husband at an Anglican school, but I am not, I think, a credulous person, nor am I a fatalist. Yet there is, I find myself compelled to acknowledge, a more troubling, almost pagan aspect to the mystery of Sarah’s disappearance. From her vivacious correspondence, and from our conversations during her 1989 visit, I perceived the degree to which her biographical project absorbed, exhilarated, and, at a less calculable level, troubled her. As her letters will show, quite early in her researches her ancestor’s story took an oddly fatalistic turn. A superstitious reader might believe the material she uncovered about her relative actually presaged the fate that caught up with her in those barren mountains. As I say, I recoil from this idea. Why should my friend not be imaginable as a lively old woman?

I have chosen to keep this memoir in the form of the original letters, month by month, in the order I received them. In addition I have solicited reminiscences of Sarah from several people who knew her and their responses preface Sarah’s own letters. Quite deliberately I interplay my own portrait of my friend with that she created of her seafaring forebear, Charlie Tilber. They belong together.

And I grieve and puzzle over what has happened to her. For I have been unable to rid myself of the very superstition I mention above: namely, that the nature of the material which so absorbed the last year of Sarah’s life inevitably appears to implicate itself in the fate which has befallen her. Her nonchalant spirit would pooh-pooh this idea, yet one of her letters declares:

‘Think! An animal will forget its parents in a twinkling. Yet we live with the past like we live with the sea. It moves and breathes all around us. Why will it not be at rest? So deep am I in the life of Great-Uncle T, that at times the past’s message seems implacable. You can neither stop nor still me, so there\ I tell you, it is not the particular ghost of Charles Tilber that haunted dear old Albert during our recording session, but the heave and sway of the past itself, with all its unfinished business. My particular business was to seek friendship with a once-living ancestor and somehow it seems to have emptied me, hollowed me out. Why does that business glitter so at the same time as, obscurely, it wearies me?’

And in that postcard from Valparaíso where she speaks of inventing Maie Alice Yuell, having discovered an old photo of the girl in the Museo del Mar, she asked me the question: ‘Do you think a person’s face can have its fate written on it, like poor Maie Alice?’ Like Sô?

To the postcard I wrote back impatiently, saying that I would never accept any view of misfortune being so destined that you could see it printed in a person’s features. It would have been one of our few real disagreements, but I know now she had left Valparaíso for northern Chile by the time it arrived, so it is likely she did not receive it. In the card I further told her I repudiated this primitive determining of human lives. And I do so now.

Yet I cannot make it go away.